An open letter to Stephen Grootes

Dear Stephen Grootes

I must insist that you stop writing for The Daily Maverick. Now. Put away your pen, shut down your laptop, throw away your dictionary and lead a life of verbal abstemity.

You’re ruining it for the rest of us. Those of us who are hobbyist scribes. While we doodle, agonise, write, delete, re-write, CTRL-Z through entire paragraphs, you effortlessly churn out 500, 600, 800 word articles cutting through the fog of politics with, alternately and as is appropriate, a scabbard and a scalpel. Then, to really rub it in, you lob the steaming entrails and innards of political life onto the operating table for your readers to feast on even as we’re still wrestling with the can opener, trying to find a witty and insightful opening line that just won’t crystalise on the screen in front of us. You’re long done, with your feet up on your desk, sipping a strawberry daiquiri while showing the rest of us the middle finger.

Stop it. You are, I suspect, a bloody agent. Or worse. You could, in fact, be a bloody double agent. So those who think you’re on their side are wrong, and possibly right, depending on who you’re working for that day. And what’s with the schizophrenia? One day we’re all in the land of milk and honey. We middle-class whiteys tear up our Aussie Immigration forms and reach for another beer. Then – wham – the next day comes along and you tell us that everything is shit. So off we go to Qantas.com in search of cheaper airfares.

I remember you. In the fluorescent glow of the Rhodes Music Radio studio you used to pounce in, gazelle-like, all eager eyed, fresh-faced and enthusiastic. You actually used to write your sports bulletins before the red light came on (imagine that!) while the rest of us glaze-gazed at you through an unshaven, hungover blear. You had something that, today as a parent, I recognise as being a “work ethic”. In 2011 speak – WTF????

Which brings me back to my central point, which can best be summed up thus: How dare you? We were both at the same university, probably shared the same lecturers, bars and possibly even girlfriends. But yet, somehow and somewhere, you discovered that you had a knack for finding the political pulse and putting your finger on it. And then digging through the flesh with your fingernail, ripping out the pulsing vein, and holding it aloft like some sort of Lion King trophy. It almost makes me want to burst into Hakuna Matata. And me? I don’t know where I was at the time, but it sure as hell wasn’t doing anything nearly as useful as you. How dare you? Where did you learn so much? How did you get so bloody clever? Fuck.

It’s just not fair. And I must ask you to stop now.

Regards
Tony

PS The above piece took me twelve days to write. I did nothing else – not even eat. You would have done it in twelve minutes, and it would have been better. I rest my case. Bastard.

Short URL: http://www.tonylankester.com/?p=670

Posted by tony on Aug 4 2011. Filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry